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November 10, 2010

Book Review: The Truth Of the Matter, by Andrew Klavan

If what you’re looking for in a book is subtlety and nuance, Andrew Klavan’s Homelanders series of young adult novels is not the place to go.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for something to appeal to young males (the explicit target market for the books), you’ve come to the right place.

These are books for boys who like video games (at one point Charlie West, the book’s hero, even gets to use an actual weapon that works like a video game controller) and extreme sports. “Extreme” describes The Truth Of the Matterwell—not in the sense of extreme shock content or extreme edginess, but in the sense of action that never slackens, but constantly ratchets up the dramatic tension. Poor Charlie barely gets a chance to grab a nap or anything to eat through the whole story. Wherever he turns, he’s got enemies on his tail. The premise isn’t terribly realistic, but that’s the whole point. This roller coaster of a story isn’t intended to give you time to consider its plausibility. The only drawback is that it’s so compelling that it’s hard to stretch the reading of it longer than a day and a half or so, and you want more. On the other hand, Charlie’s earned some rest.

Somewhere in the Bible—I couldn’t remember where just then—it says you’re supposed to be happy about the hard things that happen to you, you’re supposed to be grateful for the “trials” you go through because they test your faith and harden your endurance. Well, I definitely wasn’t happy—or grateful. The truth is: I was angry, ticked off to the maximum. I was sick of trials, sick of being tested. I was eighteen, for crying out loud. I was supposed to be getting ready for college. I was supposed to be with my girl. I was supposed to be preparing for life. It wasn’t fair that things should be so hard for me, so dangerous. It wasn’t fair that there was no one to help me, that God wouldn’t help me, that I was all alone. I wanted my life back, my ordinary life. I wanted to go home. It wasn’t fair.

This is the third volume in the Homelanders series (which, as I understand it, will be four books long). Charlie, who woke up at the beginning of the first book shackled to a metal chair in a torture chamber, unable to remember the entire previous year of his life, has been following up every lead he can think of ever since, to learn why a secret terrorist group is after him, and why the police think he murdered his best friend. In this volume, at last, he starts to get some answers, and his memory starts to return. Unfortunately, this does not necessarily make him safer.

But he’s a tough kid. Tough, and patriotic, and a believer. Just the kind of guy you want your own kid to hang out with.

This has been a pretty great month for Andrew Klavan fans. Both this book and his new adult novel, The Identity Man, are fresh on the shelves, and you can be sure I’m working on The Identity Man right now, and will have a review of that ready in a couple days.